Black Scale Bug on Lemon Trees

black scale bug on lemon trees

Ever wondered why your lemon tree was dropping leaves with its branches dying and its fruits getting deformed? The possible cause could be citrus scale pests. The most common of them all is the black scale bugs. The Black scale …

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Dividing (Splitting) Up Rhubarb

dividing rhubarb

Years ago I was given a Rhubarb plant from a work colleague.

I’ve talked before about the journey of this poor neglected plant into my garden. The short of it is that it was left to dry out, forgotten in a garage, then eventually sent my way where it got (accidentally this time) left for another day to dry out, then finally planted in the garden to flourish.

As I said in that post, Rhubarb plants are tough. They are extremely resilient and while I wouldn’t recommend treating them badly like my first plant was, they can tolerate a fair bit of unkindness.

It’s been at least 18 months since my Rhubarb plants found their current home, and at that time they were split off from the original plant to create 5 new plants.

Dividing Rhubarb up is not only useful for propagating more plants, it’s also important for keeping the original plant healthy. The bigger it gets, the thinner and fewer the stems tend to be, and the whole plant can get a little out of control.

Which is where our Rhubarb patch had got to.

dividing rhubarb

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Pruning Your Boysenberry Plants

pruning boysenberries

pruning boysenberries

There are some jobs that I absolutely dread doing in our edible garden.

Not too many, but some that are so difficult, horrible, or painful that I just don’t want to do them.

Pruning our heritage Boysenberry plants is one of those jobs.

I don’t mind digging around in the worm farm, shoveling compost and making fish fertiliser (oh the smell!) but when I know it’s time to cut back the Boysenberries, somehow weeks and months drift by and I still haven’t done it.

Which means that it was totally overdue to be done and with one month of Winter left, time was running out.

So, last week I finally got onto it.

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Mint Refurbishment

how to grow mint

Things have got a little out of hand in the Mint department. Our Mint patch is looking rather unruly right now which means it’s time for the bi-annual herb refurb. Every Autumn and early Summer our Mint patch gets a good haircut …

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Pruning Blackberry Plants

Blackberry PlantsAmong the many berry plants we have on our 1/4 acre, we have four Navaho Blackberry plants which are an erect, thornless varierty that produce large crops of delicious, fat, sweet black fruit.

Well normally.

This Summer, we didn’t get such a great crop from two of our Blackberry plants.

The fruit was dry and sparse and the plants weren’t looking that healthy.

The other two plants did really well and produced a fantastic crop. But as always in our garden, we want more!

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